Publications

Lack of agreement on how to define and measure sprawl has hampered development of policy related to its causes and consequences. We question previous work for two reasons: the use of study areas that overbound or underbound sprawl landscapes, and the failure to account for land unavailable for development. We formulate "extended urban areas," based on housing density and commuting patterns and argue that they represent a preferable geographic basis for measuring sprawl. We operationalize with satellite imagery a way for measuring land unavailable for development in these areas. We then compute five measures of urban development using the National Land Cover Data Base and decennial census data to assess the extent of sprawl in the extended urban areas of Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington. Our sensitivity analyses reveal that the measurement of sprawl critically depends on which land area forms the basis of the analysis, and, to a lesser degree, how one accounts for land unavailable for development.

The article summarizes evidence regarding racially discriminatory acts in the mortgage lending market. Various information sources are considered: paired-testing studies, statistical studies of lending patterns and loan rejections, administrative histories, legal suits, case studies, and mortgage underwriting standards. The review demonstrates that, although there remain many unanswered questions about the scope and nature of racial discrimination in mortgage lending, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the problem still exists.

We investigate whether rental housing discrimination directed against 2 predominant ethnic minority groups in Sydney, Australia, is more likely to occur in neighborhoods with a particular mix of ethnicities, socioeconomic profiles, or quality of social goods and whether this geographic pattern reinforces spatial disadvantages of these minorities in a way that abets their social exclusion. We construct measures of differential treatment based on in-person paired testing conducted in 2013, with Anglo, Indian, and Muslim Middle Eastern testers. We summarize 4 dimensions of postcode-level social goods using a principal component analysis reflecting school quality, crime rates, resident employment rates, proximate jobs and job growth, and commuting options. Our ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions show that differential treatment in the Sydney rental market is strongly related to a neighborhood’s ethnic composition and 2 aspects of its social goods involving both desirable and undesirable components but is not related to the socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood’s population.

How should we allocate public resources for revitalizing low-income urban neighborhoods? Once public investments in an area reach some minimum threshold, do they leverage substantial private resources? To address these questions, we examine a coordinated, sustained, and targeted revitalization strategy begun in 1998 in Richmond, VA. The strategy was developed through a data-driven, participatory planning process that garnered widespread support. Our analyses reveal that the program produced substantially greater appreciation in the market values of single-family homes in the targeted areas than in comparable homes in similarly distressed neighborhoods. The greatest impacts occurred when public investments over 5 years exceeded $21,000 per block, on average. This appears to make the strategy potentially self-financing over a 20-year horizon, with public contributions offset by future increments in property tax revenues from target areas.

Are Ethnic Enclaves good or bad? Exploring the relationsship between individuals' incomes and the immigrant character of their neighbourhood

We quantify how teen employment outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos relate to their neighborhood conditions during ages 14-17. Data come from surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households who have lived in public housing scattered throughout Denver County. Because DHA household allocation mimics random assignment to neighborhood, this program represents a natural experiment for overcoming geographic selection bias. Our logistic and Tobit regression analyses found overall greater odds of teen employment and more hours worked for those who lived in neighborhoods with higher percentages of pre-1940 vintage housing, property crime rates and child abuse rates, though the strength of relationships was highly contingent on gender and ethnicity. Teen employment prospects of African Americans were especially diminished by residence in more socially vulnerable, violent neighborhoods, implying selective potential gains from social mixing alternatives.

In this article, we investigate the threshold‐like effects of four aspects of neighborhood environment: poverty rate, adult nonemployment rate, female headship rate for families with children, and secondary school dropout rate. We used a sample consisting of virtually all census tracts from U.S. metropolitan areas. The relationship between the value of numerous neighborhood indicators in 1980 and subsequent changes in each of the four dimensions of neighborhood quality of family life from 1980 to 1990 was evaluated statistically using a regression model with a spline specification to test for nonlinear, threshold‐like processes. Stressing the exploratory nature of the study, we find evidence of threshold‐like effects in an endodynamic relationship (poverty rate and subsequent changes in that rate), and in exodynamic relationships (occupational status and rental rates and subsequent changes in several neighborhood quality indicators). Implications for research and a spatially targeted neighborhood reinvestment policy are derived from the analysis.

1. Editorial: Neighbourhood Effects on Social Opportunities - The European and American Research and Policy Context 2. Social Norms in Distressed Neighbourhoods: Testing the Wilson Hypothesis 3. Living in and Leaving Poor Neighbourhood Conditions in England 4. Social Effects of Urban Restructuring: A Case Study in Amsterdam and Utrecht, The Netherlands 5. Neighbourhood Effects and Social Mobility: A Longitudinal Analysis 6. Behavioral Impacts of Poor Neighborhoods: Towards New Data and Analytical Strategies 7. Re-Shaping the Geography of Opportunity: Place Effects in Global Perspective

Preface Prologue. Two Daughters of Detroit 1. Riding on the Freeway: A Riff on the Place Called Motown 2. Sculpting Detroit: Polity and Economy Trump Geology 3. From Fort to Ford to ... ? 4. From Old World to Old South and Old Testament 5. Who Will Feast on the Fruits of Labor? 6. Turf Wars 7. Wrestling for Pieces of the Proletarian Pie 8. Feasting on Fear 9. The Dynamics of Decay, Abandonment, and Bankruptcy 10. What Drives Detroiters? 11. From Motown to Mortropolis Epilogue. Two Daughters of Detroit Revisited Selected References Index Ac knowledgments

No abstract is provided for this article.

European research attempting to quantify neighbourhood effects has relied almost exclusively on analyses of observational data. No consensus has emerged, perhaps because a variety of statistical procedures have been employed. We investigate this by exploring the degree to which alternative, non-experimental statistical methods yield different estimates of the relationship between neighbourhood income mix and individual work income when applied to the same longitudinal database. We find that results are highly sensitive to the statistical approach employed. Methods controlling for geographic selection bias generally reduce the negative association between low-income neighbours and individual earnings, but substantial differences across models remain. Controlling for both selection and endogeneity produces larger associations and evidence of non-linearity, something that is hidden in models only controlling for selection. All methods suffer shortcomings, so we argue for multi-method investigations to identify robust findings, with instrumental variables and fixed effects on non-mover samples being preferred. In our case, we find a substantial neighbourhood effect, regardless of the method employed.

Using longitudinal register data from Oslo, Norway, this article examines how cumulative childhood exposure to family and neighbourhood contexts influences the educational attainments of young adults, paying special attention to how these determinants vary by gender and immigrant status. Specifically, we examine how neighbourhood socioeconomic and immigrant context experienced during childhood affects the completion of secondary school and university enrolment during young adulthood. We assess the extent of effect heterogeneity for three immigrant status groups stratified by gender. We control for geographical selection using a recently developed technique that first models parental selection of neighbourhood attributes and then uses the resulting predicted probabilities of selection as instruments in the neighbourhood-effects-on-education model. We find that neighbourhood affluence, educational levels and non-Western immigrant composition have important impacts on young adult educational outcomes, though results differ sharply by gender and immigrant status.

This chapter demonstrates both in theory and practice that multiple domains related to neighborhoods are characterized by nonlinear or threshold effects that hold powerful implications for both the social rationale for and strategic formulation of neighborhood revitalization and resident diversification policies. This chapter synthesizes research demonstrating that how neighborhoods shape individual behaviors related to residential mobility, investments in property, educational attainment, fertility, employment and a variety of other domains often manifest threshold-like relationships. It considers the nonlinear effects associated with changes in neighborhood racial composition, poverty, and assisted housing, and how these are associated with changes in crime and property values. It advances the proposition of linked threshold effects. Individual mobility and housing investment decisions are triggered discontinuously once perceptions and expectations regarding the neighborhood have exceeded critical values. Aggregations of individual actions typically lead to large changes in neighborhood conditions only after these causal forces exceed a critical point. Once begun, aggregate changes in neighborhood conditions progress over time in a nonlinear fashion once they exceed another critical point.

This rejoinder addresses the response to articles by Berkovec, Canner, Gabriel, and Hannan. While our earlier comments emphasized the biases in the default approach, we focus here on the basic disagreement: whether, given those biases, the default approach provides a viable test for mortgage lending discrimination. We argue that the default approach does not provide such a test. The Berkovec, Canner, Gabriel, and Hannan research (BCGH, 1994 and in this issue) provides a careful empirical look at racial differences in loan default rates using data on Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages. In this rejoinder, however, we focus on the key issues that separate us. First, we express our deep concerns about the basic conclusion of the BCGH article; then, with those concerns in mind, we suggest a change in future default specifications. In addition, we discuss the problems inherent in their suggestion that default rates may be useful for partitioning the observed incidence of racial discrimination into two different types: statistical and prejudiced based. Our fundamental disagreement with BCGH centers around the following statement, which is found in their article (in other words) and appears in their response to our critiques: “… FHA loan performance data do not support a finding of widespread systematic discrimination in mortgage lending due to lender prejudice.” Although they acknowledge that their approach may suffer from a variety of biases and cannot prove that discrimination does not exist, they argue that proof is too high a standard for any empirical test. In response, we propose an alternative standard: Performance analyses should not be used to identify discrimination in mortgage lending unless it is demonstrated that these analyses are at least as effective as relevant alternative analyses, such as traditional analyses based on loan approval data. We conclude that the default approach fails to meet this standard under virtually all circumstances. Consider the two key assumptions referred to by BCGH as no omitted variable bias and no statistical discrimination. The first assumption implies that all unobserved variables known to the lender are uncorrelated with race. If that is not so, the BCGH results are biased away from finding discrimination. In this case, BCGH point out—and we agree— loan application studies are also biased, and the bias is in favor of finding discrimination.

“The Social Costs of Concentrated Poverty: Externalities to Neighboring Households and Property Owners and the Dynamics of Decline” We investigate theoretically and empirically two interrelated potential consequences of the spatial concentration of poverty: negative externalities to proximate residents (stimulation of socially harmful behaviors like crime) and property owners (reduced maintenance and, in the extreme, abandonment). Inasmuch as these consequences are capitalized into property values, we use changes in these values to make a rough estimate of the aggregate dollar costs to American society of the aforementioned externalities. We demonstrate the conceptual importance of threshold effects in the analysis of the potential costs of concentrated poverty to the society as a whole. We develop three theoretical models of the consequences of concentrated poverty: (1) micro-level, explaining how/why such would affect household behavior; (2) micro-level, explaining how/why such would affect property owner behavior; (3) meso-level, explaining how concentrated poverty, household behaviors and owner behaviors interrelate when aggregated to the neighborhood level in a mutually causal way. We specify and estimate two empirical models that show in reduced form the changes in property values and rents that transpire from changes in neighborhood poverty rates, both directly and indirectly through impacts on housing upkeep and crime. The first is a hedonic model of individual home sales in Cleveland from 1993-1997, and uses lagged annual observations of public assistance rates in the surrounding census tracts as a way of confronting the issue of simultaneity between values and poverty. The second models median values and rents in all census tracts in the largest 100 metropolitan areas from 1990-2000, and instruments for neighborhood poverty rates. Results from both models are remarkably similar, and show that there is no substantial relationship between neighborhood poverty changes and property values or rents when poverty rates stay below ten (10) percent. By contrast, marginal increases in poverty when neighborhood poverty rates are in the range of 10 to 20 percent results in dramatic declines in value and rent, strongly suggesting a threshold corresponding to the theoretical prediction. Using parameters from the second model, we simulate how property values and rents would have changed in the aggregate for our 100 largest metropolitan areas had populations been redistributed such that: (1) all census tracts in 1990 exceeding 20 percent poverty had their rate reduced to 20 percent by 2000, and (2) only the lowestpoverty tracts were allocated additional poor populations, with each increasing their poverty rate by five percentage points. We find in this thought experiment that owneroccupied property values would have risen $421 billion (13%) and monthly rents would have risen $400 million (4%) in aggregate, ceteris paribus.

Where people grow up can be very important to their educational and other life outcomes. Using evidence from a public housing program in Denver, Colorado, George Galster finds that low-income Latino and African American children who lived for sustained periods in better off neighborhoods were less likely to drop out of secondary school or to repeat a grade. With this in mind, he argues that in order to increase the educational outcomes of low-income minority groups, public housing program planners should locate more subsidized dwellings in neighborhoods with greater advantage.